3. A Jolly Way to Kill Time In this passage, Katie Grant, writing in the Scotsman newspaper in March 2005, gives her views on the advantages and disadvantages of a “Gap Year”. As the mother of a gap year student, I read with interest extracts of the study “Seeing the World: An Examination of Backpacking as a Global Youth Culture” by Lucy Huxley, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University. Lucy Huxley may be a clever girl, for all I know, but why it took her three years, and doubtless thousands of taxpayers’ pounds, to discover that gap year students may go abroad but, once there, hang about mostly with each other, phone home constantly and learn almost nothing about the country to which they have travelled, I do not know. Twenty-four hours in the home of a gap-year student’s parents would have shown her, more graphically than any study, what modern gap-yearing is all about. In the main, it is about pretence: the pretence of independence. The advent of the e- mail has made that pretence increasingly difficult to uphold, but we do it anyway. Since our gap-year daughter is in Italy and unlikely to read this, I will reveal, with a twinge of disloyalty, that scanning back through her emails, I know almost nothing about her life, but an awful lot about her bank account. Recently, as I travelled on the train between Glasgow and Edinburgh, I found myself sitting behind a group of first-year university students indulging in an exquisite (for the listener) game of one-upmanship over their gap-year travels. In those weary, God- I’m-soooooo-cool-I-can-hardly-speak voices, two young men and a young woman talked about bars they had visited in a country whose name seemed to have escaped them – not that it mattered – and how difficult it was to manage a hangover when the temperature was 35C. They laughed, again in their soooo-cool way, about vomiting in the street of a town (un-named) among people (un-named) who were “really soooo sweet”. Then they tried to outdo each other’s tales of discomfort. I am sure they thought all their fellow passengers were suitably impressed by their gappie sophistication. Sadly, we were too polite to disabuse them. These young people illustrated only too clearly that, for most young adults, gap years have become nothing more than a jolly way to kill time. Nowadays, although gappies still return home with that oddly endearing kind of youthful arrogance that declares them to have been there, done that, as if that settled the matter, in fact, their year out no longer generates any real knowledge about anything, as the path most of them have trodden is well-beaten and they mostly hang out with each other. It is claimed that students have a more productive time if they go to countries on organised placements. But whereas this has some advantages, if only to stop gap-year students wandering pointlessly from bar to beach and back, it still does not quite produce the independence of spirit, or the ability to cope with the unexpected or the severance from the familiar that the gap year should ideally be about. If a gap-year student’s greatest achievement is to have followed the advice of some group leader on a pre-packaged expedition to a specially-made jungle camp, or to have successfully spent some months essentially playing at being a teacher in a third-world village, all arranged through organisations such as Gap Activity Projects, they will have had a wonderful time, and may even have learned a skill or two, but it is hardly the stuff from which heroes are made. It would be unfair to tar all gappies with the same brush – some do use their time productively – but it seems to me that gap years have forfeited any claim to be an essential part of the maturing process. For middle-class British students, the best that can be said is that a gap year begins, very gently, to wean them away from the culture of the risk assessment exercise and the health and safety checklist that has cosseted them all their lives so far. Though insured to the last strand of designer-straightened hair, gap-year students must, I hope, take at least a smidgen more responsibility for themselves than they did in their school sixth form. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. If, for middle-class English gappies, far from teaching them how to combat loneliness and homesickness or opening their ears and eyes to other cultures, the gap year has become little more than an early introduction to corporate bonding, where the only lesson learned is how much they drink under a baking sun, there are others who would benefit hugely. When I was at Glasgow University (graduated 1997), far too many of my fellow students had scarcely been beyond the end of the road. The Scottish system, which sees students finishing school one term and beginning “yooni” the next, in effect simply swapping the classroom for the lecture hall while still living at home and being looked after by their mothers, is as grim a recipe for parochialism of outlook as you could devise. There are, I know, good financial reasons for this arrangement, particularly with the four year Scottish honours degree system. But it sets such a limit on the student’s outlook on the world that it should be discouraged. University should be a faintly alarming experience. It should see students feeling, occasionally, that they have leaped out of a plane without a parachute. If Scottish students cannot afford to live away from home during their university careers, a pre-university gap year, however pre- packaged, might provide some useful shock therapy. Moreover, if more Scottish students took a gap year, university dropout rates – currently rising – would drop, since those shovelled into the university system as statistical cannon fodder would probably realise, as their horizons broadened, that “yooni” was not from them and find something else to do. So while Lucy Huxley’s study does prove something – that modern gap years lack a good shot of adrenalin, with spoon-feeding preferred to self-reliance – the gap year theory is still a good one, even if the practice has gone soft. 4. Friends Reunited The website “Friends Reunited” became very popular in the early years of the 21st century. It allows people to make contact with former classmates from school and to exchange information with them. The passage below, which appeared in the Herald newspaper in January 2003, is by Melanie Reid, at that time a regular writer of “opinion” pieces for that paper. Read the passage straight through in order to get a general grasp of Reid’s attitude to the website and the people who use it. The moment you log on to the Friends Reunited website, as an estimated 15000-20000 people do every day, you embark on a strange kind of anthropology: a journey into your own past. There you will find people whose names you vaguely recognise, and encounter long-forgotten memories: whiffs of floor polish or mouldy hockey boots; the slam of desk lids. There, among the ghosts of your school days, you will find a simplicity and a certainty about who you once were. If ever anyone wanted proof that nostalgia sells, Friends Reunited is it. The website, which now has eight million subscribers, has been the phenomenon of internet-age Britain. With more members than there are trade unionists, and fast catching up with the Automobile Association’s 12 million members, Friends Reunited has become one of the biggest organisations in the country in just over two years. Like all hugely successful ideas, it couldn’t have been simpler: offer a national message board for old school friends who may not have seen each other for 20 years or more. Now 45,000 schools are listed, and anyone can log on, read about other people, post an update on their own lives, and for a small fee, make contact. Most people are happy just to chat about themselves. The website’s “success board” and “school memories” lists are filled with enthusiastic stories, happy events, self- conscious jokes (and a plethora of exclamation marks). “I had a wonderful time at both reunions, and would like to invite anyone from the class of 1964 to get in touch.” “A very old and close friend of mine found me though your website. We lost touch 20 years ago.” “Miss Greaves – we nailed a rotten kipper under her desk and she took hours to find it!!!” “We played American skipping which was with elastic bands joined together: does anyone remember that?” Friends Reunited has a compulsive quality: it defies human nature to log on and then not to peek at the list of your own contemporaries. So it was that, in researching this piece, I was unable to resist opening a door to my past to find an entry from a small boy I once carried aloft in piggyback fights at primary school, whose entry is fairly typical of a million others: “Married for 20 years (to the same person!). Two daughters 12 and 9 (late starter!). Still living in town (really boring!). Still playing rugby (bloody mad!!). I am a maths teacher (really bloody mad!!!!).” You can see what I mean about the exclamation marks. Read between the lines and you perceive a decent, self-deprecating man who, for all his self-consciousness about doing it, can’t help reaching out into the ether to see what the past can offer him.